


the secondhand stiffness of death

by zechariahfour (sodas)



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Series, Spoilers for End of Series, discussion of canon character deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 09:52:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17979113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodas/pseuds/zechariahfour
Summary: Yut Lung purses his lips. One cheek dimples into a curving pain. Then he unpurses them and shuts his eyes. Even in Sing’s grief, some things carry on: as always, Yut Lung’s eyelashes fan out like the charcoal markings on an albatross. “I was wondering about your brother,” he murmurs.





	the secondhand stiffness of death

**Author's Note:**

> this draws from some things we're told in Garden of Light.

“Oh, God,” says Sing, “you really came for this?”

He’s an asshole to say it; he can tell by the sharp and sudden raise of Yut Lung’s eyebrows. The way his mouth opens without venom in it, round and uncommon like a half dollar coin. All the shine of small change, and none of JFK’s pride or strong jaw. Sing has seen Yut Lung do a lot of stupid things and seem unashamed of them, but this here is humiliation. Yut Lung takes half a step back before he’s able to school his face into one of his shitty, pretty expressions. He tosses his head: like a swan, anyone would think, but Sing knows better. He’s more like a horse afraid of harm, afraid of making the jump.

Sing _knows_ better. He puts his face into his hand and rubs it. “Could you chill out?” he asks. “And could we, just this one time, not make it about you?” He’s not snapping it, just saying. And he says this too: “I didn’t mean it like that. I need you to give me one day where I don’t have to explain that I didn’t mean it like that. I just didn’t want—” On half a breath, Sing’s lips pinch together, and he stares daringly at Yut Lung. That is, if Yut Lung _dares_ to toss like the swan again and avoid his eyes, they’re going to have a problem right here on the side of the street. “I didn’t want you looking at me with this face,” Sing says, despite the strong-willed stare-down. “Talk about not being at my best. I mean, you’re… I knew you’d be…” He waves his hand in a vague sweep, one that measures the whole length of Yut Lung. Yut Lung, dressed in the colors of roses and rose hips and cream, is undoubtedly wearing clothes worth more than the monthly rent checks Sing forges in his absent mother’s name. And Yut Lung himself is not unlike a rose. He’s fresh and glossy like any flower, and Sing is even pretty sure he hasn’t had a drink too recently. His complexion is more lively for it, smoother and defined like the edge of a flower petal, sharing its flourishing hue. He must be gulping water instead. He must be feeling better.

It’s a far cry from Sing: stale, filmed over with grief and three-day-old sweat. He meant to shower but he walked around outside instead. For hours, and hours, and stupidly, he walked around the streets. He stopped by home as little as possible, and he only let himself just barely touch his mattress. The result is a boy like brittle chalk. Sing hasn’t looked at himself in a mirror recently, but he’s caught glimpses from reflective surfaces, and he can guess at the smudging around his eyes, the sick-seeming sheen of him, and the presence of at least one stain on his T-shirt. Maybe it’s why he’s bullying Yut Lung into looking long at him now. A misdirected punishment. _You wanted so badly to come take a look at me, so here you go!_ But Yut Lung ducks his head at last, grimacing at the asphalt just before he slips into the car.

“I don’t particularly care,” he says, while he disappears into the back seat. “You know that?” His expensive slacks and sweater whisper against the leather seats. Sing’s instinct is to be pissed off, or to stay out on the sidewalk, kick the tire of the ritzy car, and let Yut Lung be driven off alone. But he can’t muster any more fury for today, even though it’s only nine in the morning; he’s exhausted and he’s sore to the core of his flesh. Yut Lung is as much a brat as ever, but the air conditioned car with its soft seats will be kinder to Sing than another few hours of walking in his worn out shoes. Sing gets inside. He doesn’t buckle his seatbelt, and he doesn’t say anything further. Neither does Yut Lung. The car simply leaves the morgue.

\--

The ride is grim and refrigerated, and Sing is too conscious of it, which is all just like his brother’s body. Well, he wagers, most things will be, for a while. What shape won’t remind him of Lao’s brow or stubborn chin? What shade of grey isn’t like a corpse’s mouth?

For a while, Sing tries to put his sullen stare out through the window of the car, but his silhouette is too embarrassing, and he can’t meet its eyes. He watches his knees instead. He’s still watching them when he realizes he doesn’t know where Yut Lung is taking him. Then he asks his knees, so Yut Lung will hear him: “Where are we going?”

“You tell me,” says Yut Lung. It’s not snippy. It feels like too broad a possibility, as if Sing could ask to head to Maine or Martha’s Vineyard and Yut Lung would barely sigh before they went.

Sing only waits a moment before saying, down at his knees, “I wanna go home.” At last he tries to look at Yut Lung’s face, but only sees the back of his head, and the edge of his reflection from where he stares into the window. “Can you please take me home?”

So Yut Lung does, and the entire ride, when either of them look at each other, the other is looking away. That’s a relief.  

\--

As Sing unlocks the door to his apartment, the one he shared with Lao, he realizes he can’t keep coming back. The cops from the morgue will have realized, by now, that if no mother or father or responsible adult could come and verify Lao’s face, the brothers were living alone. So when he opens the door, he does it with a gasp, as if trying to bring in to himself whatever particles of Lao remain here. He just gets a mouthful of stale air.

Yut Lung barely follows him inside. He hangs back by the door.

“You’ll have to excuse me, boss,” Sing says trimly. “It’s been a hell of a morning.”

Yut Lung nods. He looks like he’s second-guessing himself, but he’s trying to banish the doubt from his face when he speaks up. “Did they show him to you?”

Sing stares at Yut Lung, and then laughs one _hah_ while he keeps staring. It wobbles into a weird pitch. “You had a point all along,” he says. He’s surprised by both the words he’s saying, and the anger with which he says them. His pitch is still weird. Yut Lung blinks at him and Sing blinks back. “About Ash. You did sort of have one. Because nobody can _ever_ stop thinking about him—believe me, I haven’t quit it either, but look at you—not even _you_ have.” Yut Lung opens his mouth, but Sing runs him over, which feels good. “Yeah, they did. They showed me Ash. Asked if I could say his name for them. Confirmed I had the right _alias,_ even though I only ever knew him as Ash. How could he be anybody else? I saw his face and the way his hair fell, and of course I knew it was him. So what do you want to know? They didn’t show me the awful stuff, if that’s what you’re wondering. Nothing nasty. Yeah, right. His dead face, what they showed me—that’s what was the awful stuff! Is that what you wanted to know? What he looked like, dead?”

Yut Lung purses his lips. One cheek dimples into a curving pain. Then he unpurses them and shuts his eyes. Even in Sing’s grief, some things carry on: as always, Yut Lung’s eyelashes fan out like the charcoal markings on an albatross. “I was wondering about your brother,” he murmurs, “and whether you had to see him like that.”

While Yut Lung stands where he is, arms draped around his own waist, leaning like a tilde against the doorframe, Sing opens his mouth and pantomimes a fish. He could start to say so many things, but all of them fall short. Including this: “Oh.”

“Yes,” says Yut Lung.

Sing spins on his heel. The sole of his sneaker has lost all of its tread, and it squeaks when he moves like that. The squeak is somehow defiant, as if reminding Yut Lung where he is and who he’s talking to: a shitty apartment and the shitty little boy within it. “I got soda and I got beer,” he says. “Nothing fancy to offer you.”

Again the horse, stately and afraid, Yut Lung tosses his head. “I don’t want—” Unseen, Sing is already rolling his eyes. But Yut Lung says, “I said it before. I don’t particularly care. I’m not here for what you think I am—I don’t know exactly what that is, but I can tell it’s wrong.” Yut Lung’s back is pressed against the door frame. It digs into him, unpleasant, his shoulders gone tense in discomfort. He doesn’t want to make the jump. But he makes it. “I’m not here to tell you that you’re not garbage or that nothing is your fault, or that you’re rich in spirit if not in cash. Everyone knows I’m the last person who can say what is or isn’t right. But I’m fine with it. I won’t tell you what you are or aren’t. I’m only saying, whatever you are right now, I want that.” He pauses, but he doesn’t want to let that sink in. He made a confession while hoping Sing won’t notice it. Hoping to deflect, he says, “Maybe you'd like to be alone.”

“Maybe,” says Sing. “I don’t know.” He’s taking it to heart, these days, how true that is. He thought he had know-how, and he thought he’d do all right, but it turns out he’s only been rubbing elbows with ignorance all along. He shuts the fridge without taking anything out of it. “It’s not so weird, to be in here. We didn’t spend a lot of time at home together in the first place, and even before today, he didn’t come back. I didn’t see him for days, so I think I knew already. Well, actually I figured it was something else.”

“What did you think it was?” asks Yut Lung. He doesn’t sound snotty and he doesn’t sound sleek. He doesn’t sound like much of anything. Sing appreciates that.

“What I figured was, he took off. He had enough of all of it—couldn’t blame him if he did. With our mom gone and me doing all the crap I’m always doing and saying all the crap I said. With Ash Lynx being Ash Lynx. Always…” Sing rests his forehead against the refrigerator door. “That bastard was always himself, until the very end. I wasn’t lying, about Ash. I saw the pictures of both their faces. Actually, you might get mad to hear it, but Ash died with a smile. So he died himself: totally mysterious and a huge headache.” He picks up his head, then thuds it against the door again. “Ahh, I guess they both were.”

Yut Lung does the nicest thing he ever did for Sing, and ignores Ash Lynx’s smile. Then he says something that could be considered mean, instead. “Is it worse than him running off from you?”

This startles Sing, who rattles the handle of the fridge door before turning around to look, with wide eyes, at Yut Lung. _This guy is a total asshole!_ he thinks, and then: _We’re friends!_ The revelation hits his unwashed face like cucumber slices over his eyes. It’s refreshing, crisp, and a little gross if he thinks too hard about it. Yut Lung is good at charming people and better at driving them off. If he’s this awkward, right now, and if he knows so little about what to say, it’s because he’s not trying to charm Sing _or_ drive him off. They’re friends. And if that’s true, Sing wants to be honest. “I don’t know.” Gross, if he thinks too hard. The threshold isn’t a tough one to reach. But he’s being honest with his friend. “Things don’t hurt more or less than everything else. Sometimes it’s—sometimes it hurts way less than you think it should, and somehow it’s still killing you. Or there are levels to it, not like it matters more or less than the last thing that hurt you, but it does different shit to you. Being hurt does something to you. You can’t always guess what it’ll be. I don’t know what I’d do if he booked it and left me behind.” His voice cracks in the way it did when he was twelve. “But I don’t know what I’m gonna do now, either.” It was only two years ago, you know? When he was twelve. And like with everyone bigger than him, he waits for Yut Lung to snap at him for an unwanted lecture, or to call him wise, either in sarcasm or syrupy indulgence. But Yut Lung doesn’t even open his mouth. Sing tells him, with sullen earnestness, “Thanks for not saying anything.” He tries to show he means it, tentative in this friendship: “I needed that.”

“I supposed,” says Yut Lung. Sing understands suddenly that he isn’t being flowery for the sake of it: he just does talk that way. They both look around the apartment, seeing wide cracks here and emptiness there. Yut Lung’s appraisal is not unkind.

“Well,” says Sing. If he could make his tongue like Yut Lung’s, he would _suppose_ it’s time for Yut Lung to head out and leave him to it.

But Yut Lung says, “Do you want to come home with me?”

Sing lets out a puff of breath. It cuts off and into itself before it even knows what it was supposed to be, a laugh or just incredulous. “And do what?”

“I don’t know, either.” Yut Lung shrugs. And is this a choice or an imperative? “Figure it out.”


End file.
